"Runagate Runagate" portrays the Underground Railroad, which in the middle
1800s aided slaves to escape north to freedom via a secret network. Led by Harriet Tubman
and traveling mostly at night, the slaves would rely on navigation by stars, such as the
'drinking gourd' (the Big Dipper constellation which incorporates the North Star).

Rhythmically, the poem captures the mood of frantic flight of a 'runagate' (a renegade
or escaped slave):

Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness
and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror

Another good example of his organic use of metrics is in the abundant stresses and
onomatopoetic pace of the lines in 'Runagate Runagate'. Like the rhythm of the title, the
meters in the poem suggest the frenetic pace of the running slaves and the steady,
rumbling movement of a train, appropriate to the motif of the Underground Railroad:

Obviously playing off the whole symbolic implications of this period in history as a
time of darkness, Hayden uses the journey northward (upward on a map) as a figural
expression of incipient spiritual ascent. just as the speaker has, after his descent,
journeyed through the dark to discover the 'hidden ones' and his own means for escape and
enlightenment, so this poem uses the physical journey to symbolize that spiritual
pilgrimage.

But the journey is not an easy one; like the diver or the persona at Veracruz, the
escapees are tempted to give up, until they are prodded into action by the indomitable
heroine Harriet Tubman:

And fear starts a-murbling,
Never make it, we'll never make it. Hush that now,
and she's turned upon us, leveled pistol
glinting in the moonlight:
Dead folks can't jaybird-talk, she says;
you keep on going now or die, she says.

As in the final poem 'Frederick Douglass', the journey here is at midpoint and true
freedom is a vision of the future, but these heroic figures, especially in the context of
the Baháí perspective of history, substantiate that vision and flesh out the
dream: 'Mean mean mean to be free'.

"Runagate Runagate," an archaic expression for a runaway slave, opens with
especially keen heights of dramatic tension that bring alive the sense of dangerous
enterprise and desperate, breathless, and uneven flight that the runaway slaves must have
experienced:

Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness
and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing
and the night cold and the night long and the river
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning
and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere
morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on
going
Runagate
Runagate
Runagate

Verbs in the present tense, lack of punctuation, use of various feet from the
prevailing trochaics in line 1, extra syllables in line 4, help evoke the sense of
dramatic tension and create reader involvement in the situation. Throughout the remainder
of parts 1 and 2 of the poem, changes in cadence, the techniques of fragmentation that he
used so effectively in "Middle Passage"--lines from hymns, spirituals,
antislavery songs, wanted posters, voices of the slaves and of Harriet Tubman--and
typographical spacing that helps carry the sense of the passages while further
demonstrating Hayden's debt to T, S. Eliot, reveal that the poem does, indeed, belong to
the same creative period as "Middle Passage." "Runagate Runagate"
however, must surely have been intended as a companion piece to "The Ballad of Nat
Turner," for it treats the part of the female revolutionist in the antislavery war
that blacks raised in their own fight to be free.

Hayden's revisions of "Runagate" for the 1966 version are characteristic:
rearrangement of passages for better order, cadence, and emphasis; a stripping away of
rhetoric to develop sharper images. These changes, slight in part 1, are marked in part 2,
where he shifts the emphasis from a rhetorical and laudatory description of Harriet Tubman
to a few lines that show her in action and vividly evoke her presence.